Global village is a term coined by Wyndham Lewis in his book America and Cosmic Man (1948). However, Herbert Marshall McLuhan also wrote about this term in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). His book describes how electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media. Wyndham Lewis in 1916 Percy Wyndham Lewis (November 18, 1882 – March 7, 1957) was a Canadian born British painter and author. ... Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar. ... The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is a book written by Marshall McLuhan and first published in 1962. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

Today, the global village is mostly used as a metaphor to describe the Internet and World Wide Web. The Internet globalizes communication by allowing users from around the world to connect with each other. Similarly, web-connected computers enable people to link their web sites together. This new reality has implications for forming new sociological structures within the context of culture. An example of this phenomenon is The Global Sports Village [1]. Look up metaphor in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... WWWs historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet. ... Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning to cultivate), generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. ...

Although McLuhan refers to it by a toponym, the Global Village is actually a historical period, not a place. It was immediately preceded by what McLuhan calls the "Gutenberg Galaxy" (another geographical designation for a chronological period). Though its roots can be traced back to the invention of the "phonetic alphabet" (McLuhan's term for phonemic orthography), the Gutenberg Galaxy, like the Global Village that followed it, was ushered in by a technological innovation, the Gutenberg press. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... A phonemic orthography is a writing system where the written graphemes correspond to phonemes, the spoken sounds of the language. ... The printing press is a mechanical device for printing many copies of a text on rectangular sheets of paper. ...

However, the Gutenberg Galaxy phase of Western Civilization is being replaced—McLuhan is writing in the early 1960s—by what he calls "electronic interdependence," an era when electronic media replace the visual culture of the Gutenberg era, producing cognitive shifts and new social organizations based on aural/oral media technologies. For alternative meanings for The West in the United States, see the U.S. West and American West. ... A screenshot of a web page. ... Visual culture is a field of study within cultural studies focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images. ...

One sticking point in McLuhan's argument is his emphasis on the oral/aural nature of electronic media. McLuhan's thinking is clearly influenced by the technology and culture of the United States in the 1950s: he often makes references and draws analogies to jazz, the radio, the telephone. Critics in the 1960s were quick to point out that the most important new electronic technologies (film, television, computers) were, in fact, predominantly oriented towards the visual. // Recovering from World War II and its aftermath, the economic miracle emerged in West Germany and Italy. ... Jazz is a style of music which originated in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States at around the start of the 20th century. ... The telephone or phone is a telecommunications device which is used to transmit and receive sound (most commonly voice and speech) across distance. ... The 1960s decade refers to the years from January 1, 1960 to December 31, 1969, inclusive. ... Film is a term that encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. ... The tower of a personal computer. ...

As a result of this shift in technology and media, McLuhan claims that humankind will move from the individualism and fragmentation that characterized the Gutenberg Galaxy to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the Global Village (in Gutenberg Galaxy, the term is always capitalized), a term which has predominantly negative connotations (a fact lost on its later popularizers):

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

Note McLuhan's characteristic stress on the importance of awareness of a medium's cognitive affects: If we are not conscious of how technology impacts cognition and society, the global village has the potential to become a place where totalitarianism and terror rule. On the other hand, it could create a problem-solving world-wide forum, enabling a new sense of world community. The Royal Library of Alexandria was once the largest in the world. ... A BlueGene supercomputer cabinet. ... In animals the brain, or encephalon (Greek for in the head), is the control center of the central nervous system. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... Bold text:This article applies to political ideologies. ... The term Western World or the West (also on rare occasions called the Occident) can have multiple meanings depending on its context (i. ... Look up Cognition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Young people interacting within an ethnically diverse society. ... Totalitarianism is a term employed by political scientists, especially those in the field of comparative politics, to describe modern regimes in which the state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private behavior. ... Terror is a pronounced state of fear, an overwhelming sense of imminent danger. ... A typical Internet forum discussion, with common elements such as emoticons, avatars, and quotes. ... This article or section is not written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article. ...

See also

• Informational Revolution